Gratitude.
It's not an easy virtue, even on a good day.
Far easier is an attitude of entitlement--that sniveling and singularly unattractive presumption that what's yours is yours by virtue of merit or morality or some other human achievement or distinctive.
While I've not seen any hard data to support the following claim, I feel confident in saying that gratitude has been, for most of us, an especially elusive virtue in the Year of Our Lord, 2020.
It's been a zany, crazy, twists-and-turns, tragic sort of year.
Together as a country, we've witnessed and, yes, had to endure a host of heartaches: a global pandemic with shelter-in-place orders, isolation from family and friends, job loss and financial hardship, missed graduations and deferred college enrollments, church closings, racial injustices and civic unrest, an increasing polarizing country and difficult election cycle, not to mention wildfires and celebrity deaths and impeachment proceedings.
2020 has indeed been an unforgettable year, and hopefully, one not to be repeated. This may lead us to ask: How can we give thanks in circumstances such as these?
And while I write this from the comfortable confines of my own home, and you are likely reading this from the same, it is the case that this year has felt foreign, bizarre even, like we're living in a country not our own.
Where are we? And, as to the elusiveness of gratitude in 2020, "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" (Psalm 137:4).
Aristotle, that most famous of pre-Christian philosophers, was somewhat unimpressed with gratitude. Virtue, for Aristotle, was something one cultivated, something one did, a habit formed over time and through practice.
Gratitude, on the other hand, is a kind of non-action: it is, at root, a receiving from another.
Interestingly enough, Aristotle finds a faint echo in a famous saying of Jesus: "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35). Christians have always underscored the priority of being others-oriented and outwardly-giving. We call it love.
And yet within the Christian story, love is only understood rightly in light of the Cross and Resurrection--supreme gifts, both.
For the Christian, then, gratitude is grounded in the central tenets of our faith, wrapped around the self-giving of the Son. Which makes gratitude, as a Christian practice and theological virtue, both interesting and essential.
During this month of November, as we celebrate that most gratitude-suffused national holiday known as Thanksgiving, we at the CPT are going to explore this wonderful grace called gratitude.
This resource is part of the series In All Circumstances – A Theology of Gratitude. Click Here to explore more resources from this series.
Todd Wilson is the President and Co-Founder of the Center for Pastor Theologians. He previously served for 10 years as the Senior Pastor of Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park, IL. He holds a PhD in New Testament from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of several books, including The Curse of the Law and the Crisis in Galatia (Mohr Siebeck, 2007), Mere Sexuality (Zondervan, 2017), and The Pastor Theologian (Zondervan, 2015).
